114.  Learning From Consequences

I learned to ride my sister’s bicycle in our driveway which was dirt and gravel.  When I made a sharp turn in front of the garage, the tire slid on the gravel, and I fell and put a gash in my knee. After it healed, I rode the bike in the same place, and fell again. I put another gash in my knee. How dumb can a kid get?  Eventually I could ride the bike safely and ventured off the farm.

It was on one of my rare mile-long bike rides down the dirt side road south of the orchard to visit a friend who lived on a neighboring farm, that I learned a valuable lesson.  The lesson was something I should have already known, “Think before you act.”  Looking for something to do or see, we went to the barnyard, hoping to see where the cows were.  The cows were nowhere in sight, but movement in the lane leading from the barn caught our attention.

CONSEQUENCES

I thought it was a weasel.
He thought it was a rat.
When we hit it with a stick,
We found it wasn’t that!

We saw this little critter,
Walking down the lane.
We started chasing after it,
With no reason in our brain.

We caught up with the critter,
And discovered we were sunk.
The black and white critter,
Was a straight-spraying skunk!

A lesson learned the hard way,
It’s not too smart to harm,
The little critters that you meet,
Out back upon the farm.

So remember what we learned that day,
Two boys with childish thinking,
That being inconsiderate,
Can really leave you stinking!

113.  Squeaky Drawer in the Attic

How was I inspired to write my book, Mouse in the Manger?  I recalled the mangers in the stalls in the barn where I released two baby mice.  Here’s the whole story.

Halfway down the long spooky dark hall upstairs was a door on the left with a step down into the space under the roof.  There was only one window in the wall at the far end of the attic, so it was always dimly lit because there were no lights.  The chimney from the fireplace below came up through the center, and behind the chimney an unused stairwell led down to the dining room.

The attic had plenty of headroom to walk in the narrow path around the chimney and stairs. The path was narrow because the room was filled with chests and trunks and shelves full of treasures of four generations.  There were trunks of clothes, and linens, and boxes of seashells from Grandma’s time in Florida.  Toys overflowed the shelves on the left — toy guns, a small wooden cart, blocks, Tinker Toys, model planes, comic books and puppets.  A heavy wooden bi-plane emblazoned with “The Spirit of St. Louis” hung from the ceiling by the chimney.

A pile of old mattresses in the corner by the window gave me a place to curl up to read or dream, or listen to the blowflies buzzing by the window.  I was in the attic, lying on the pile of old discarded mattresses in the corner reading a Dick Tracey Big Little Book when I heard a faint squeaking.  I traced the sound to a chest of drawers by the stairwell.  The squeaking stopped when I slowly pulled the bottom drawer way out.  There it was!  Tucked way in the back of the bottom drawer was a wad of shredded paper, wool, and cloth bits fashioned into a perfect rectangle so it exactly fit the space, and looked right in place with the old clothes in front of it.  Was this a mouse nest in our chest of drawers?

I carefully parted one end of the nest, and pulled the top back to see inside.  Wow!  There, nestled in the smooth interior compartment were two tiny pink baby mice.  Their pink skin had no fur, and their eyes were not yet open.  Oh, oh!  We had caught a mouse in a trap in the back room.  Could that have been their mother?  I called Mom to see.  Mom told me that it didn’t matter if mother mouse was gone or not, because now that I had touched the nest, my scent would be there, and she would not return.

Obviously, mice were too destructive to have living in the house.  I could only imagine where all the cloth and wool, and bits of many things had come from to make the nest.  I hoped the shredded paper was not one of my favorite comic books.  But how would we dispose of these tiny helpless newborn mice?  I couldn’t imagine Daddy squishing them under his boot.  Maybe we could flush them down the toilet?  It would be impossible to feed such tiny things, even if we did want to save them.

I didn’t figure on Mom’s incredible compassion for little creatures, and her ingenuity.  My sister had a baby doll with its own little baby bottle that actually worked.  With Mom’s patience and steady hand, she managed to entice the baby mice to drink her milk and honey formula from that little bottle.  Daddy shook his head in disbelief, but Mom nursed and cared for those mice until their eyes were open, and they were trying to climb out of their box.

I let them go in the barn where there were lots of mice.  The barn was the perfect place.  They could do no harm, and there was no one to harm them.  They scampered free to live happily ever after!

MICE ARE NICE

Do you hear sounds around your house,
That you suspect might be a mouse?
Just think about these little mice,
And you’ll agree that mice are nice.

The average mouse is very small;
He hardly eats much food at all.
He rarely makes a squeaking sound,
While he’s sneaking all around.

A Kangaroo mouse is really cute.
He has big ears and feet to boot.
With little itsy bitsy toes,
And whiskers all around his nose.

His shiny eyes can see at night.
His tail is long, and quite a sight.
He likes to sneak around the house,
Because he’s timid as a mouse.

Chocolate is his favorite treat,
But cheese is always good to eat.
I hope imagination will suffice,
For you to think that mice are nice.

112.  RED AND THE PUPPET SHOWS

When I was eight years old, my aunt Viva helped me make a puppet.  To be honest, when Red was done, I’d have to say I helped Viva and Mom make a puppet.  Viva was the artist in the family, and was constructing a marionette show with the intention of doing shows professionally.  Red was a marionette with the same head and parts as one of Viva’s puppets.

Viva sculpted the head of soft clay, and helped me make a Plastic Wood replica.  She painted his face, and we glued on red doll hair.  I cut out wood body parts and shoes, and we connected them with leather joints.  Viva carved realistic-looking hands of wood.  Strings were fastened to Red with screw-eyes, then up to the control bars.  Mom sewed the small slacks and shirt, and Red was born.  Red stood about eighteen inches tall and could walk realistically, and skate to the Skater’s Waltz.

We made a clown, and Viva made a Bugs Bunny for me.  Alan, my neighbor friend who was in high school, liked the idea and made an Elmer Fudd to go with Bugs, and a fabulous tramp, and a character who was Master of Ceremonies.  Viva had made furniture to scale for her professional show, so we had a sofa, chair, and a grand piano.

We created a simple, ingenious stage.  Two big dowels in Christmas tree stands held the front curtains.  Two card tables on their sides with a cloth draped over were the back of the stage.  Two floodlights up front and a bulb with a color wheel gave us theater lighting, and we were in show business!

Alan and I created variety shows with skits, jokes, singing, and Red doing the Skater’s Waltz wearing aluminum foil skates.  Mom played the music on the piano at home which we recorded and played during the show.  My sister Jan sang with a young lady marionette from Viva’s cast.  Red was the star of the show.

We did shows at elementary schools, a few churches, and the local farmer’s Grange Hall.  I think we sometimes charged ten dollars, but one church took up a collection of fifty dollars from the audience.  We were delighted!  The show business ended when Alan graduated and left for college.

Viva took me to a national puppeteer’s convention in Chicago.  I was amazed at the variety of puppets by the professionals.  There were many Punch and Judy style hand puppets, and puppets on rods, and shadow puppets, but very few marionettes.  Viva arranged for me to do a little pantomime skit from our show with the clown and a jack-in-the-box.  The clown tried to walk up a plank to the top of the box, but the top kept rising up a little and tipping him off.  Finally, the top pops up with the jack-in-the-box clown head, and our clown marionette fell down in surprise!  It was cute, and always got a laugh.

PUPPET ON A STRING

When he was done, it could be said,
“There’s no one who is quite like Red.”
His name was from his flame-red hair.
He faced the world without a care.

It didn’t matter where we’d go.
When Red went on he stole the show.
He could play piano, dance and sing.
He could tell a joke, and act, and swing.

But, he was a puppet on a string.

Red could do a lot of things,
At the whim of him who pulled the strings.
His painted smile was fixed in place.
No emotion ever stirred his face.

His wooden mouth didn’t have a voice.
His empty head could make no choice.
Live your life! Do your thing!
Use the talents you can bring!

Don’t be a puppet on a string.

111.  School Bells and Cow Bells

Summer ended, and I had to go to school.  I attended Hall School, a one-room country school down a side road about a mile from home.  At age seven, I was in second grade.  There were about fifteen students in a small building set by itself on an acre, with two paths out the back to the outhouses.  Our teacher, Miss Tanner, cooked noodle soup on a kerosene stove to augment the sandwich we brought from home.

We carried water in a bucket from a hand pump in the front yard for drinking and for washing dishes at the small sink.  In the winter, Miss Tanner built a fire in a small pot-bellied stove to keep the room warm.  We started each day with the pledge of allegiance to the flag.

A special memory was my developing a love of reading.  Miss Tanner had arranged with Bantam Books to get pocket paperbacks for twenty-five cents, and had an incentive for us to read as many as possible.  For each book report we turned in, we got a star on our chart, and after so many stars we got to choose a pencil or soap eraser.  I collected soap erasers to stack up.  I remember reading Frank Buck’s Bring Em Back Alive about capturing animals for zoos.

I usually walked to school, but one day I rode Smokey to school.  Smokey was the big attraction of the day!  All the kids wanted to ride the pony, pet the pony, or feed the pony!  During class they were looking out the window to see what Smokey was doing.  Recess was chaos!  The teacher and I agreed that Smokey was too much of a distraction for me to ride to school.  From then on, I walked to school.

As I walked home from school toward the highway one day, it occurred to me it would be shorter to cut across the pasture, instead of walking all the way to the corner.  So I climbed the fence and started across.  About half way, I realized I was not alone in the field.  There was a herd of cows off in one corner.  Afraid, I started running.

COWS IN THE PASTURE

The cows in the pasture, what do they do?
They graze, and gaze, and sometimes they moo.
The cows in the pasture, what do they see?
A little boy running; the little boy was me!

The little boy is running, what should we do?
To see why he’s running, we’d better run too.
The cows in the pasture, running to see,
Why I was running; they were running toward me!

Little boy running, what do I see?
A whole herd of cows, running toward me!
All of us running, was their intent to pursue?
I ran on scared, as any boy would do.

I ran to the fence, and climbed over fast.
I jumped off the fence, to a safe place at last.
The cows ran to the fence, then what did they do?
They stopped, and looked, and one cow said, “Moo.”

I didn’t stop running, I ran home to say,
“Hey folks, guess what, cows chased me today!”
My aunt was amused, “Cows wouldn’t chase you.”
To see who was running, they came running too.”

Little boy walking, what did I do?
I walked home the long way, wouldn’t you too?
The cows in the pasture, what did they do?
They grazed, they gazed, and sometimes they moo.